I started life as a journalist and political operative. I'm a consultant and the author of "Reinventing You" and "Stand Out." I also teach for Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. You can download my free 42-page Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook at http://www.dorieclark.com/join.

Why Great Leaders Make Bad Managers - and That's OK

Leadership and management are very different skills. Yet most of the time, we expect corporate executives to wow us with their detail-oriented approach to management and then suddenly metamorphose into visionary leaders the moment they’re promoted. It doesn’t usually work out, says Annmarie Neal, the author of the forthcoming Leading from the Edge (ASTD Press, 2013). “A leader is somebody who sees opportunity and puts change in motion. A manager is somebody who follows that leader and sees how to structure things to create value for the company,” she says. “I’ve found that the best leaders weren’t really good managers. Yes, they understood the discipline, but they weren’t the best accountant, or the best technical person, or the best brand manager. They can do it, but they have a way of [thinking about the issues] at another level.”

Of course, great leaders can’t eschew management altogether. When it comes to what Neal calls “the act of management – the 1950s and 1960s B-school management theory of analysis, planning, process, structure, and order,” it’s important for leaders to grasp its importance, and know how to supervise. But that doesn’t mean they need to do it themselves. “You need to understand there’s a discipline called management, and it’s valuable, and you can’t just be chaotic,” Neal says. “Facebook figured that out and that’s why they hired Sheryl Sandberg [as COO].”

Sandberg, with her wide-ranging skills, may be an exception. But in general, it’s very hard to find top talent that excels both in leadership and management. “Planning to the nth degree,” a hallmark of management, “bothers really good leaders,” says Neal. “They’re trying to figure out opportunities – what’s at the edge, the adjacencies, the disruptive space 3-4 steps away. They’re making social and political connections, and that uses a different part of the brain.” Meanwhile, top managers may be too detail-oriented to thrive as big picture thinkers. “It can be a hard transition for a really good manager to let go of those controls,” says Neal.

So why do we insist that leaders must rise from the ranks of managers? Neal says it’s the misguided legacy of performance reviews and how executives have traditionally been evaluated. “A lot of organizational process today stems from management in the industrial age,” she says. “It’s almost Taylorism; let’s ‘widget’ everything. But how do you ‘widget’ innovation? We have to step back and let the processes go, or somehow redesign them.”

In Leading from the Edge, she profiles one older executive who was on track for the C-suite and took a major assignment to develop a new international market for his company – a critical assignment, but one marked (as almost all new efforts are) by some missteps. “He was charting new territory for the company and the company was evaluating his performance based on traditional, core, S-curve values, but he was off building these new S-curves. How do you value a new, never-been-done-before business unit?” The executive believes his career stalled as a result. “It’s so easy to be a manager,” says Neal. “You’re rewarded for it, and probably you’re safer. You’ll ‘get better grades’ for it.”

In a study she conducted when she was a top executive at a Fortune 500 firm, she discovered that “people who were out of the box, pushing the edge, thinking in terms of the horizon…got lower [performance] ratings than the people who could show crazy execution on nonsense.” It’s a huge mistake – and a missed opportunity – for corporations, she says. You have to be able to evaluate managers and leaders on the criteria that matter most for each: “You’ve got to change that system. You can’t really want a system where you say, ‘I prefer you to drive nonsense…and that matters more than the person who puts their neck on the line.’”

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I totally agree. These are two different skills. Unfortunately, there are still big corporates out there who cannot distinguish between the two and end up incurring disastrous costs by employing the wrong person. To put it simply, Leaders create and managers execute. Good article. Thank you, Dorie.

You define a leader as “A leader is somebody who sees opportunity and puts change in motion.”

No, that defines an out-of-the-box thinker, a highly creative type. Leadership can only be understood by first understanding what followers follow.

In a business, a leader leads people because of what followers do. Followers, about 95% of all people, more or less follow the value standards reflected in the actions and inactions of management, their leaders. They use these value standards as how to treat their work, their customers, each other, and their bosses. The values are industriousness, neatness, knowledgeableness, respectfulness, courteousness, fairness, openness, perseverance, honesty, quality, and the like. These value standards constitute leadership, nothing more and nothing less.

For instance, most managements don’t listen to their people or respond to their concerns, issue lots of orders to them, and don’t provide to them the information they want. All three of these treat employees with great disrespect and that explains why studies show that ~70% of all employees are either disengaged or actively disengaged.

This also explains why a person who shows great creativity is an exception and why you view them as a leader. By being a great creator or being able to recognize and act upon an opportunity, they do lead others toward that kind of excellence, but within command and control structures they are not appreciated. In such environments, those who rock the boat are not appreciated as you correctly point out.

Superior leaders are able to cause employees to become highly motivated, highly committed, and fully engaged literally loving to come to work and at least 300% more productive than if poorly engaged. Poor leadership leads employees to be disengaged or so mad they become actively disengaged.

Best regards, Ben Simonton Leadership is a science and so is engagement www.bensimonton.com

Good points spelling out the differences between being an out-of-the-box thinker and a leader. By pure definition of the word, to be a leader, somebody’s got to be following you. Thus, an innovative, creative thinker, that charges ahead and puts ideas into action is not a de-facto leader if there aren’t a group of people WILLINGLY (not just for a paycheck) following him/her. And on the other side of the coin, there can be a leader of people in an organization that plays it safe and doesn’t have grand ideas, but motivates employees to do their best and to be committed to him/her and the organization.

Thank you for your post Dorie. To answer your question at the end, I am not sure if a leader should have no management skills because his/her vision could quickly be exposed to be an illusion if he/she has no idea about what is realistic. Reading your post you might better differentiate between a functional expert who has not enough understanding of a business from a bird’s eye view to see change and the generalist who can look across borders and melt opportunities together? If all it takes to be a leader is to see some change than maybe nearly everybody could be called a leader and maybe many of them could be called a dreamer.

Good point, Peter, and it’s true – every leader should have *some* management skills or they’d quickly falter. I think it’s more a question of emphasis – that if you have sufficient baseline skills in management, what can really make you excel at the top is a broader vision.

Asking “How do leadership and management differ in what you do?” is a question we ask interviewees in our career documentary interview series to provide a knowledge video resource that helps our audience plan, pursue and achieve aspirational careers.

The results trend toward there being a difference between the two and either taking responsibility to separate the two or to prioritize each differently at different stages of the entrepreneurial or career journey.

There are several examples. I’ll share three.

Richard Moross is founder and CEO of UK-based Moo.com and has grown his venture capital backed firm significantly over the three years (to date) of our career documentary interviews. Here, in his Year 3 interview (2012) he talks about making the transition from a leadership role into more of a general manager role as his company has matured:

A 2nd perspective comes from social media agency Carrot Creative co-founder and CEO Mike Germano on what he has found to be the difference between leadership and management. This comes from Year 3 (2012) in his documentary interview series:

This has certainly been one of the most popular debates in the theory and practice of management/leadership for a long time.

I remember interviewing a CEO in the hospitality industry about 10 years ago who displayed the “quintessential” characteristics of a leader and was known for hiring a very competent team of professional managers. This was 10 years ago and he and his team considered his style to be right for the industry and his position.

It seems that 10 years later the sentiments about what leaders and managers should be and should excel at have not changed much….or is this what we are led to believe?

But let’s just think about this: Will you be happy if your manager was only efficient, but not effective and your leader was only effective, but not efficient? I would not be. Will you respect a leader who was not organised, overlooked details but had great vision? Will you like them? I know that the people led by that CEO didn’t. But they accepted the status quo – managers manage and leaders lead.

Another significant factor,which will play maybe the biggest role in increasing (and sustaining) the expectation of the current and future employee that their great leaders should also be great managers and vice versa are the big transformations of the business/organisational structure. We have all witnessed the flattening of the organisational hierarchy and the disappearing of the middle management level (one of the key reasons the manager-leader distinction became possible and worked well).

Other contributory factors for the manager-leader skill merge will be increasing global competitive pressures ,the need to continuously learn/multi-skill but most importantly the internal pressures and expectations of people to be both managed and led well by their manager-leader.

I believe the typical role of the manager of the future will most likely resemble a cross between a team leader and a project manager. So what kind of skills will they require to inspire their team as well as get things done?

I believe that leadership and management are complimentary systems they serve different needs as your article describes perfectly.

Leaders have a responsibility to understand and foster good management practices within their management teams. They also need to have a clear understanding of what great leadership entails so that they can promote good behaviour amongst their managers and thereby create a positive corporate culture that ensures a competitive advantage for their organisation.

A good manger who is a great leader is a viable preposition – whereas a great leader who is a poor manager is often a very messy affair and very ineffective.

For reasons of positive culture and effective organisations I believe the question about leadership and management does matter. Just as I don’t wish to see great managers who can’t lead in charge of a business, I certainly don’t want to see ‘Great” leaders without management skills in charge either. This often leads to out of control egos which history shows us is disastrous.

Tim, good point. Great, visionary leaders may not be the best managers – but if they really want to make a positive impact, they have to be self-aware enough to know they should bring in a good COO to help them. Without a great manager somewhere in the mix, you’re in trouble.

Dorie, I agree, a COO providing the balance needed is a good solution. Regarding self awareness, one of my colleagues Margaret Ryan, describes this a finding a conscious leaders – that is one already open to the idea that they need to harness the power of their teams and the broad diversity within their organisation. Leadership without management is not scaleable – Management without leadership stifles growth – organisations must have both at every level to succeed, scale and create GREATNESS.

An organisation that has many departments with one overall strategy for promotions normally will have many great leaders. However because members of each department will depend on eachother the team leaders will focus on his or her people and not the organisation. And in so doing will overlook ethical considerations, when members make critical mistakes or when they use motivation it will be for the members personal development and not for the good of the company. Public compaines where employment is govern by law normally end up in this parodox where good leaders have no choice but to be bad manager in order to keep relationships they built in their departments.

The task of the company that will stand head and shoulder above others in any industry is one which has in its vision to develop an honest culture within the organisation. The employees must see the company as an asset to them and must make the outputs so much greater than their inputs. The leaders must lead workers to first love the company and the mangers must manage the development of its leaders, the company must take care of its people and its people must take care of it. Employees must be seen as the companies greatest assets and employees must see the company as their greatest tool as they seek development.

Most organizations don’t realize this. Leaders are the big-picture thinkers and decision-makers who create a framework, much like an architect, while managers fill in the details, much like building contractors. The two work together, but they have uniquely different gifts and contributions to the finished product.

In regards to the ending question, I believe that several variables in our world today are forcing companies’ needs for individuals which can not only distinguish the difference between leadership and management, but can reasonably know which role to play at the appropriate times.

10-15 years ago, I don’t believe anyone truly needed both skill sets to find career success, however businesses and teams who are lucky enough to employ these individuals [like Sheryl] enjoy a further level of indirect diversification within their teams and businesses which translates to a metric less focused on: flexibility.

Changing corporate structures, economies of scale, and most importantly Technology (empowering people in the ways they shop) have created a demand for individuals who are capable and, aware of both sides of this equation.

Businesses can still succeed without these individuals, but those who employ this new age of corporate awareness will be the difference between a good company and a great one.

IN my opinion one person can wear two different hats depending on the situation. At one point a manager can be a leader and a leader can also be a good manager in order to be more effective. Yes leaders who are great managers are above others who cannot. As a leader, how can you plan and set a vision for your organization without knowing how your company operates. I must admit that I am biased towards a person holding a managerial position first, before one becomes a leader. Great leaders must have a good training ground in order to be able to acquire the necessary skills and adopt the qualities needed to become great. In this case, I couldn’t think of any appropriate training ground other than being a manager first.